


Ourboros

by pokeasleepingsmaug



Series: Sons [4]
Category: Vikings (TV)
Genre: Childbirth, Drabble, Motherhood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-03
Updated: 2017-10-03
Packaged: 2019-01-08 15:19:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 640
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12256944
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pokeasleepingsmaug/pseuds/pokeasleepingsmaug
Summary: Aslaug thinking about Sigurd's fate immediately after his birth.





	Ourboros

The instant his bright blue eyes met hers for the first time, Aslaug saw the ourboros and heard the music of a lute. Two such contrary things in such a tiny boy—marked for greatness, for glory in battle, with the soul of a bard. Poetry and song, the ringing of steel and the cries of the wounded. He's a breathing contradiction, this third son of hers.

And not in the way Hvitserk is, with his layers of light and dark like the sea, storm and serenity in one boy. No. Sigurd is conflict and peace, the bane of man and the love of woman. He is not like Ubbe, gentle and kind to the very core of his being. Sigurd is.... Volatile. Too strange and powerful a contradiction, it will tear him to pieces if he isn't strong enough to handle it.

And that is what the music is for—some way to soothe his conflicted soul, the difference between who he wants to be and what the world wants him to be. Son of Ragnar, marked for greatness, and the man who loves music and is in love with the very idea of love itself. Bringer of death and singer of songs, he is the warrior and the skald. 

He is the child of autumn, the dying of the world and the gift of the harvest. Sigurd Snake-in-the-Eye, the gods whispered his name in her ear the moment she felt him stirring within her, after her father Sigurd Fafnirs-bane. He was a boy of contradictions who would grow to a man of the sagas.

He's the quietest of her sons when he's born, at once a child of love and an old man who's known violence. She sees what he can become, and her heart fills with the rightness of it. 

But then she sees what else he may become—young and still and pale, facedown on a wooden platform, the victim of an ax thrown by a dark young man and his own relentless tongue. He is a contradictory boy, even now, crying for her breast and yet refusing to take it when she guides him to it. Aslaug grits her teeth, gentle fingers stroking the babe's cheek, coaxing, cajoling. 

He cries out again, shaking his little head in fury. The cry brings Ragnar shuffling in, Ubbe and Hvitserk clinging to his legs, laughing. Sigurd turns his curious face toward the noise, tiny pink mouth agape as they approach, and he finally, finally, accepts her breast. He is the third son, will always be trailing after his big brothers and his mother, nearly lost in the chaos of a family of many sons.

Aslaug knows this and feels guilty. To make up for it, she turns her full attention to the nursing babe. Hvitserk screams out for her, but Ubbe is there to hug him tight, and he quiets. He's still sniffling, jealous, used to being her baby, but Ubbe has always been too wise and kind, too fatherly for a boy of his age. Aslaug is grateful for that. He needs this one moment of her undivided attention, this third son so prone to anger and jealousy, so full of compassion and bitterness.

She knows that he will be the one she destroys, that her own mothering will be his downfall. She knows that if she fails him, he will be still and pale and set adrift in a longship far too early. But the vision of him as an old man with a lute is fleeting, a distant possibility. Aslaug knows he is marked for greatness that he may never achieve, and it will be her fault. The weight of it is enough to grind her bones to dust, and she gently rubs his back and prays that she will be enough to save him.


End file.
